Still though, the sniffy "merely a toy" is kind of over the top. Are automobiles merely toys because they don't have the range, passenger capacity and speed of a Boeing 747? How about motor scooters? And bicycles? The Gimp is not as good as Photoshop. Is it good enough for many uses? Sure.
Indeed. And having progress per se is what proprietary software like Photoshop has to do in order to sell more licenses. Why would you buy the most recent CS version if Photoshop 6 was certainly good enough?
The logic is different. GIMP does not have to evolve in order to survive. It's open and if you need it doing something it doesn't, you can hire a developer to do it. The fact nobody does it is because it's good enough for what it's used for.
+1, although, to be correct, economically "the fact nobody does it" means the cost is higher than the benefit. You could purchase a copy of photoshop for much cheaper than the cost of hiring a good developer for a week.
> You could purchase a copy of photoshop for much cheaper than the cost of hiring a good developer for a week.
True. That's why pooling resources is such a good idea. If you need a feature that's missing from Photoshop, you can find other people who need that feature (or would like to have it) and pool resources to hire someone to do it in GIMP. If you have a company with 10 seats using Photoshop, it may start to become cheaper to hire a GIMP developer than providing all employees with a Photoshop license (and Adobe must have corporate licenses exactly to counter that reasoning)
Yes, this sort of thing makes it interesting (and tricky). For 'common features', buying commercial products is a good, and really simple way of pooling resources. You buy the product that has invested in the features you want. When you start talking about one-off types of things, or special, advanced features, open source can start to look a whole lot more competitive, especially since there is no monopoly on who is going to do the work.
That's not the kind of 'good enough' I meant. It's good enough for many things, not "so good that it doesn't need improvement". Anything can be improved, and doubtless the people who work on it know that.
